Cancer continues to claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. While advances have been made throughout the years in cancer detection and treatment, real-time detection of cancer recurrence and response to treatment in a person's body remains a challenge. Standard monitoring methods include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other techniques, which evaluate disease progression at 3-month intervals. This approach is both expensive and may miss disease progression due to the time interval.
One potential advancement for monitoring disease progression is the detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which are shed by active tumors in the body. The detection of CTCs could provide a novel method to track disease progression and response to treatment.
Currently, CTCs are detected from a patient blood sample. However, because there are very few CTCs, it is difficult to detect and quantify these entities from a blood draw using in vitro devices. The main disadvantage of this approach is sampling error. Typically only 7-10 cc of blood is drawn with scant, if any, CTCs in the sample, resulting in a significant sensitivity limitation.
Another detection approach requires insertion of a needle into the arm of a patient for a specified time period. The needle is then removed, and the CTCs are eluted off the tip of the device. While this method offers a tool for detecting CTCs, it does not record real-time data over the time course of treatment and is prone to sampling errors.
Accordingly, there remains a need for improved methods and devices for in vivo detection of CTCs, preferably in real-time and over the entire course of a patient's cancer treatment.